Page 7

7

Everyone was assembled in front of the big Victorian on Paradise Lane — the three elders, Tricia and Levi and Allegra Moss, along with Angela and Connor themselves. Their presence startled Bellamy for a moment…until she remembered that the two of them had the power of teleportation, so even though they’d been spending the summer at their house in Forest Highlands just outside Flagstaff, they could be here in the blink of an eye as soon as someone sent the alarm.

“They didn’t get the amulet,” Levi was explaining as they all went up the porch steps and inside the house. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, which made Bellamy feel a little better about the situation. The home was gorgeous, with its carefully restored oak floors and understated locally made furniture and Connor’s plein air landscapes on the walls, and she knew she’d been worried the intruder might have ransacked the place.

“But they got past your wards,” Angela said. She was in her early fifties, but you’d never know it to look at her, since her dark brown hair didn’t have a single trace of gray and she only had a few laugh lines in the fair skin next to her brilliant green eyes.

“They did,” Tricia replied briskly. She didn’t look too happy about the situation, but she also appeared ready to deal with the problem head on and try to figure out what had gone wrong. “No one should have even been able to get past the front door. But then there’s that.”

She pointed to the safe, which sat on a coffee table of burnished juniper in front of one of the big leather couches that dominated the living room.

Connor took a step forward, a frown of his own pulling at his brows. Like his wife, he had night-dark hair and greenish eyes, only his were a cloudy mixture of green and gray, like moss agate. “We would never have left it there.”

“And you didn’t,” Levi said. He’d paused near the entrance to the living room, but now he approached the safe and laid one long-fingered hand on top of the little box. “It was on a shelf in the main bedroom closet. Whoever got past the wards was able to bring it this far, but then they must have realized that the magic barring the front door wouldn’t allow them to remove it from the house.”

“And thank goodness for that,” Allegra put in. She was much older than the other two elders, nearing eighty and probably past the point where she should have retired and allowed someone a few decades younger to take over her duties. However, she seemed determined to drop in harness, and since Connor and Angela appeared to have decided it was better to let the matter go than press her to step aside, no one had seriously brought up the prospect of her replacement. Pale gaze shifting to Levi, she added, “I’m so glad we followed your advice and doubled the wards on all the doors and windows.”

He didn’t look very glad, however. No, he was frowning deeply, keen blue eyes sweeping the room, even though — at least as far as Bellamy could tell — there wasn’t anything to see.

Well, except the safe where it incongruously sat on the coffee table.

“They must have left it there and fled,” Levi said. “Whatever magic they used to get in, it probably told them that they’d tripped the alarm, so to speak, and that it would only be a matter of time before we came to investigate.”

Angela had moved to the center of the living room and stood there for a moment, arms outstretched at her sides, as though she was trying to reach out and feel the energy of the space. “I can sense frustration,” she said. “But that’s about it.”

“Any dark magic?” Connor asked. Clearly, he hadn’t forgotten about the recent incursion by an Escobar warlock into de la Paz territory, even though the McAllisters had mostly stayed out of that tussle.

The prima’s lips pressed together, and then she shook her head. “Not that I’m able to tell. Whoever did this, their energy feels weirdly…neutral, for lack of a better word.”

“That’s the sense I get, too,” Levi said. “Which may not mean anything at all. We could be dealing with someone who has the ability to mask their particular brand of magic.”

Bellamy had never heard of a gift like that, but she’d be the first to admit she hadn’t done an in-depth study of all the various types of magical talents that manifested amongst the witch clans. There were your standard ones, of course, like healing and controlling the weather and seeing the future, but odd ones popped up all the time. She’d heard that Marie Begonie, one of the Wilcox witches, had made it her life’s work to catalog such things in addition to keeping track of her clan’s complex genealogy, and yet Bellamy wasn’t sure whether Marie had ever shared her findings with the other Arizona clans.

“Well, the important thing is that they weren’t able to get the amulet,” Tricia said, still sounding no-nonsense and brisk.

“No, they weren’t,” Angela replied, although she appeared far more troubled. “But the problem is that now they know exactly where it is.”

“We can take it back to the Forest Highlands house with us,” Connor suggested, but his wife immediately shook her head.

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. We’re the only witch family in the development, and I’d feel better if we had it someplace where we have some backup. No, I think we’d better come back to Jerome a little early, just to be safe.”

Connor’s mouth tightened slightly, but it didn’t look as if he planned to argue with her on that point. Most of the time, they returned to their house here on Paradise Lane in late September now that they were far past having to worry about their kids’ school schedules, which a decade ago would have dictated that they be in Jerome no later than the first week of August. Now, though, they tended to linger at the higher elevations until the summer heat began to ease and they could enjoy autumn in the Verde Valley on their own time.

All those considerations had gone out the window, though, now that they had to worry about whether someone might make another attempt to steal the amulet. Bellamy had a hard time believing anyone would try such a thing if they were both here, just because she knew that working together, Connor and Angela were probably stronger than any other witch or warlock on the planet.

Well, at least now that the Escobars were no longer a threat.

She hoped.

“But thanks for putting all those wards in place,” Angela went on. “I think we would have been dealing with a very different situation if we’d only trusted the house’s regular security system to keep the amulet safe.”

Right. Even though the magic that protected the house was its first line of defense, they also had an alarm they left on whenever they were going to be gone for an extended period. No one had mentioned it getting tripped, which made Bellamy believe that whoever had broken in, they’d used magic or some other means to bypass the system.

The elders nodded, although Levi still looked troubled. Because of his otherworldly origins, he tended to take more upon himself than the other two elders, and he was probably beating himself up right now that even his powerful magic hadn’t been sufficient to keep the intruder away.

But it had been enough to keep the thief from escaping with his — or her — prize, and that was the most important thing.

Angela looked over at Marc then, as if really seeing him for the first time. “And thanks for putting the elders on alert,” she said. “Because of what you told your grandmother, she and the others were already keeping an eye out for anything strange. I think things might have gone much worse for us if it hadn’t been for that.”

He gave an embarrassed hitch of his shoulders, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether he’d actually provided all that much help. “No problem,” he said, tone a little too casual. “I just wish my dreams could have shown me who’s behind all this.”

“Well, they still might,” Tricia said briskly. “For now, though, I think it’s enough that the feeling of foreboding you got from those dreams was real, and that something is trying to communicate that the amulet is a real target.”

“Exactly,” Connor chimed in. “We owe you a debt of gratitude.”

“It’s nothing,” Marc began, but Angela shook her head.

“It’s not ‘nothing.’ Since we don’t know who tried to take the amulet, we also don’t know what they wanted to use it for. Maybe their reasons were totally innocuous — maybe they needed to boost their healer’s abilities to cure a particularly awful case of cancer or something — but I have to believe if that was their real reason for wanting to take it, then they could have just approached us directly.”

Bellamy hadn’t even considered that angle to the problem, but she thought the prima had a point there. They also could have asked Levi’s wife Hayley for assistance, since her natural-born gift offered much the same kind of magical boost that the amulet did.

Which made Bellamy think the thief’s motivations for trying to steal the artifact weren’t exactly pure.

“With any luck, we’ll never find out,” Allegra said. “Now the thief knows they can’t get the safe or the amulet out of this house, so let’s hope that’s enough to dissuade them from making a second attempt and they’ll leave us alone.”

Especially since Angela and Connor would be back here, adding another layer of protection to the amulet. Still, Bellamy couldn’t help thinking that maybe Devynn and Seth should have left the damn thing in the past.

Then again, if they’d done that, they wouldn’t have had the power to make it back to the present day. Great-Aunt Ruby, then just the prima -in-waiting, had given them a magical boost as well, but Devynn had sure made it sound as if she and Seth had needed both Ruby’s powers and the amulet to send them all the way into the mid-twenty-first century.

And that meant the current-day McAllister clan would have to deal with the fallout of possessing the thing whether they liked it or not.

Neither of Allegra’s fellow elders nor Connor and Angela looked very sanguine at the prospect of the thief just giving up and going away, but no one seemed inclined to argue with her.

“Yes, I suppose it’s no harm, no foul,” Angela said. “All the same, can you elders stay here at the house while Connor and I go home and pack up? We weren’t planning to come back to Jerome for at least a month, so we weren’t really ready to relocate.”

“For as long as you need,” Tricia assured her, then looked over at her grandson. “Marc, thanks again for the heads-up, but I think we’ve got things under control here.”

By which she probably meant that her grandson — and Bellamy — weren’t really needed on the scene, and that was fine by her. Neither of them possessed the sorts of gifts that could possibly help if there was another incursion at the house while Angela and Connor were preparing for the move back to Jerome.

Better to get out from underfoot and go someplace where they could talk in private about what had just happened.

“Sure,” Marc said easily. “I need to take Bellamy home anyway. I guess just text me if something else comes up.”

“I will,” Tricia replied, and that seemed to be that.

After saying their goodbyes, Bellamy and Marc headed down the hill to the spot where he’d left his truck parked. Both of them were silent during the walk, but she was okay with that. Once they were away from Paradise Lane, there were tourists on all sides, and it wasn’t as if they could talk about anything important anyway.

Once they were in the truck and driving down 89A toward Cottonwood, though, she figured it was safe to speak up.

“That was kind of crazy.”

His shoulders lifted. “I don’t know. I mean, we were all halfway expecting that someone might try to make a move on the thing.”

Well, when he put it that way….

“But it’s a little freaky that neither the elders nor Connor and Angela could get any sense of who was behind the theft.”

Marc nodded, although he kept his eyes fixed on the road. It was just curvy enough as it wound its way down the hill that not paying attention could be a recipe for disaster. Sure, he could have turned on the self-driving mechanism, but she noticed he’d kept the truck on manual, as if he wanted to focus on something other than the attempted theft of the amulet.

“That part does worry me,” he said, slowing as they turned onto Clarkdale’s tiny main street. “I mean, that’s a pretty powerful group of witches up there. How is it possible that the person who tried to steal the amulet is so strong that they were able to hide any trace of their magic?”

“I don’t know,” Bellamy replied. She reached into her purse and pulled out her phone, hoping maybe she’d missed a text from Devynn letting her know Jeremy Wilcox had dug up all sorts of dirt about the Olsen witch clan that would explain who’d broken into Connor and Angela’s house and tried to steal the amulet.

But she hadn’t missed anything except a text from her hair salon reminding her about her appointment the week after next. The owner of the salon was a stickler about people showing up when they were supposed to, so she’d continue to receive those messages right up to the day she was scheduled to appear.

Well, at least she wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting the appointment, not with those constant reminders.

They were past Clarkdale now and just about to head into Old Town Cottonwood. Part of her thought it might be a good idea to stop there and hang out for a while, if only to shake off her worries about what had just happened up on Paradise Lane, but then she told herself that wasn’t such a good idea. Much better to go straight home and, with any luck, convince Marc to hang around for dinner. They could get some takeout and eat at the house, since going to a restaurant didn’t seem like a very good idea, either, not when pretty much everything they needed to talk about was something they wouldn’t want overheard by civilians.

“Hear anything from Devynn?” Marc asked, and Bellamy shook her head.

“Not yet. I suppose I shouldn’t have been expecting too much — the store seemed pretty busy today, and even if Jeremy got back to her quickly, she’d still have to wait for the right time to text me when she wouldn’t get interrupted by a customer.”

Marc nodded but didn’t reply, which seemed to tell her he was okay to wait on any in-depth conversations until they were safely back at the house.

They’d get there a little past six, which was earlier than she usually ate dinner. Still, it seemed smarter to pick something up while they were still out, rather than going all the way to the ranch and then having to head back into Sedona once they decided what they wanted to eat.

“Did you want to grab some dinner?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too diffident. “There are some places in West Sedona where we can get takeout.”

Something about his grip on the steering wheel seemed to ease slightly.

Had he been worried that she would expect him to drop her off at the house and call it a day?

“That sounds good,” he said, and again, she thought he sounded just a little too casual.

So, like her, he’d been hoping this drive back to Sedona wouldn’t be the end of their day together. Once more, that familiar warmth filled her, but she told herself she needed to stay casual.

“There’s a Thai place,” she told him. “Or we can get pizza from either Pisa Lisa or Moondog.”

“‘Moondog’?” he repeated with a lift of his eyebrows.

“It’s really good,” she told him. “And a little less fancy than Pisa Lisa.”

“I’m good with not fancy,” he replied, and now a smile played around his lips. “As long as it’s okay with you.”

“After all this running around, I’m just fine with not fancy,” she said, grinning in return. “What’s your favorite kind of pizza?”

Now he looked almost shame-faced. “You’re going to laugh.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “Well, as long as it’s not anchovies, because yuck.”

Marc chuckled. “No anchovies. I really like Canadian bacon and pineapple, even though my parents have told me on more than one occasion that liking Hawaiian pizza is a crime against the pizza gods.”

How in the world had this guy turned out to be absolutely perfect in every possible way?

“Well, if it’s a crime, then I’m a criminal, too,” she said with a grin. “Because that also happens to be my favorite. So let’s head over to Moondog and order the biggest Hawaiian pizza they have.”

“Do they have cheesy bread?”

Boy, did they. And while Bellamy never ordered it unless she was sharing, she knew she’d have Marc there to do some of the heavy lifting and make sure it didn’t go to waste.

“Yes,” she said cheerfully. “And I’ve got a bottle of chianti at the house, so I think we’re good to go.”

“Sounds like a plan. Just tell me how to get to Moondog.”

“I can do that.”

She settled against the back of her seat, doing her best not to grin like an idiot. Sure, someone had tried to steal the amulet, but they hadn’t succeeded, and Angela and Connor would be in Jerome to keep an eye on things from here on out.

Better yet, Marc hadn’t uttered a peep about heading back to Tucson now that the problem had been handled, which meant it sure sounded as if he planned to hang around for a while longer.

Now she’d just have to figure out the best way to make sure his time here in the Verde Valley lasted for as long as possible.